I was born and raised in Brownsville, Texas. Comic books began my life-long fascination with storytelling. Fantasy novels eventually supplemented the four-color adventures of popular superheroes. By the time I was twelve, I had discovered the works of Robert E. Howard, Michael Moorcock, Fritz Leiber, Frank Herbert, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Edgar Rice Burroughs. Horror movies rounded out my early education in the fantastical.
Then in the summer of 1977 I saw this odd little science fiction movie called Star Wars. That pretty much decided the path I would follow in my adult life. I became fascinated with the process of bringing these stories to life. I began reading Starlog and Famous Monsters of Filmland, magazines that took the reader behind-the-scenes and revealed the filmmakers’ secrets. I was definitely hooked.
I moved to Austin in 1985 to attend the University of Texas. After a false start and a hiatus of several years, I returned to the university and received a B.A. in Liberal Arts (English) and a B.S. in Communications (Radio-TV-Film) in 1996.
A few years after graduation, I landed a job at Origin Systems as the writer on the sequel to the successful PC game Ultima Online. After two years of very hard work, Electronic Arts pulled the plug on the project. Our entire team got canned and I got my first taste of what working in the video game industry would be like. After that came a position as a writer for Funcom’s Anarchy Online, which resulted in a move to Oslo, Norway. I returned to Austin at the end of 2001 and went to work for Sony Online Entertainment as a writer on Star Wars Galaxies: An Empire Divided. That was followed by a brief stint as the writer on NCsoft’s Tabula Rasa.
In early 2004, we discovered my wife was pregnant. I decided to take some time off from the gaming industry to focus on my screenwriting and be a stay-at-home daddy. I wrote several screenplays and even managed to land a Hollywood manager. A writer position on Nintendo’s Metroid Prime 3: Corruption brought me back into the video game industry in 2005. After that project, I ended up getting a senior writer position on Bioware’s Star Wars: The Old Republic.
Finally, the chance to start up my own company pulled me away from the video game industry altogether. I’m currently the president and co-founder of Shard Studios, an indie press game company. Our line of Shard RPG products hits stores in the Fall of 2009. I’m also working on a couple of personal writing projects, including Good Green Earth, a graphic novel collaboration with artist Jim Daly, and The Sundered Gate, a YA novel I’m co-authoring with writer Austen Andrews.
I live in Austin with my beautiful wife, my amazing daughter, and two Scottish terriers.